Taketa Onsen — Spring Water Analysis, Temperature and Snowfall
竹田温泉群 · Oita
Taketa Onsen (竹田温泉群) is a nationally designated onsen town in Oita. We measured how much snow its winters bring, using the same method as for the 3,069 ski areas on this site.
How this place came to be
Taketa, in Oita — a town of about 21,000 people below the highest peaks on the Kyushu mainland, with a castle town, a high plateau, and Nagayu Onsen.
Nagayu is called one of Japan's foremost carbonated springs, for the concentration of gas, the volume and the temperature. The lords of the old domain took it as their official cure place. The town is twinned with Bad Krozingen in Germany, and the German idea of a spa town shows in its drinking fountains and buildings. In May 2003 it became the first place in Kyushu to declare all its baths free-flowing from the source — only nine towns in the country have done so. The habit of drinking the water, kept since the Edo period, continues.
Akagawa Onsen began as a working people's bath. There was once a sulphur mine in this valley, and the miners used a spring that rose there to work the labour out of themselves. The waterfall beside it was a place where monks and mountain ascetics trained.
Taketa also runs something no other town does. Since 2011 a visitor who stays three nights or more at a spa in the city can obtain a "hot spring therapy insurance passport", which pays back 300 yen a night on lodging plus 200 yen for the bath, and 200 yen per visit at day-use baths. It applies the logic of health insurance to taking the waters.
Sources: 環境省 竹田温泉群 国民保養温泉地計画書
Snowfall in winter
| Per season | 3 cm |
| Rank | 73 of 77 ranked onsen |
| Within prefecture | 2 of 3 in Oita |
| Against the median of 77 | -115 cm median 118 cm |
| Winter to winter | 14 cm 1–15 cm, leanest to deepest of twelve |
Find a place to stay · Open in maps
"Find a place to stay" searches Rakuten Travel and contains advertising; we may earn a commission on bookings made through it. The snowfall figures and ranking are calculated independently of that.
We do not link to an official site. We have not verified URLs for all 79 towns, and guessing would send you somewhere wrong. They will be added once checked.
More places to look
Just the bath
Day passes for hot springs are sold through Asoview. Japanese only.
The list covers the whole prefecture — it cannot be narrowed to this town.
Hot springs nearby, as analysed
1 hot spring sources with published analyses lie within 3 km of the centre of this onsen town, nearest first.
| Source | Distance | Temperature | pH | Type | Analysed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 竹田竹田観光開発 | 2.1 km | 31.5℃ lukewarm | 8.6 alkaline | — | — |
These are analyses of hot spring sources, not a list of baths you can visit. They date from 1910 to 2005, many from decades ago, so today’s temperature and chemistry may differ. Names are as recorded in Japanese. Temperature and pH bands follow Japan’s standard for analysing hot springs.
Source: processed from the hot spring analysis data in the Geothermal Information Database (GRES-DB), Geological Survey of Japan, AIST
Worth seeing nearby
Places within 20 km of this onsen town, chosen from those most read about on Wikipedia, favouring places with an English Wikipedia article, and listed nearest first.
| Place | Type | Distance |
|---|---|---|
| Oka Castle岡城 (豊後国) | Historic site | 1.5 km |
| Harajiri Falls原尻の滝 | Nature | 5.6 km |
| Hakusui Dam白水溜池堰堤 | Landmark | 9.5 km |
| Inazumi Underwater Cave稲積水中鍾乳洞 | Nature | 16.2 km |
| Mount Sobo祖母山 | Mountain | 16.5 km |
| Kuju Mountains九重山 | Mountain | 18.4 km |
Based on the Japanese Wikipedia lists of sights in each prefecture, as compiled in travel-log-data (CC BY-SA 4.0). English names from Wikidata (CC0). The content of this section is available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Ski areas nearby
Up to five within 40 km, straight-line, nearest first. Quality rank is out of the 397 Japanese ski areas.
| Ski area | Distance | Quality rank |
|---|---|---|
| Kuju Forest Park | 24 km | 454 of 397 |
These snowfall figures are estimates
The snowfall shown here is an estimate produced by a weather model, not a record of what actually fell.
We compared it against 63 Japan Meteorological Agency weather stations to see how far off it is. On average it comes to about six tenths of the real figure — it runs low. And it runs low by different amounts in different places: some read barely a third of what was measured, others match almost exactly. Mountains tend to read lowest.
We tried scaling everything up by a fixed amount to correct for it. It barely helped, because the error differs from place to place.
So treat these numbers as a guide to roughly where somewhere sits, not a precise figure. There is no meaning in the gap between first and second, or between 30th and 35th. Large differences between regions are real and can be read as they are.
We considered correcting the figures against the observations. But this ranking covers 3,069 ski areas across ten countries, and only Japan can be checked against weather stations. Correcting Japan alone would lift Japanese resorts above the Alps and North America with nothing behind it. Every place here is measured the same way instead.
Where a nearby weather station can be used, we print what it actually recorded on that ski area's own page.